Alibaba group announced acquisition of Data Artisans, a Berlin-based startup that provides distributed systems and large-scale data streaming services for enterprises, for €90 million ($103 million).

Kostas Tzoumas, co-founder, CEO – data Artisans, said in a statement, "Since data Artisans was founded in 2014, we have always been believers in the potential of open source technologies for developers and enterprises. That’s why we started Apache Flink as an open source framework for efficient, yet user-friendly data processing at massive scale."

He added that, "Alibaba, as one of the largest production users and biggest contributors to Apache Flink, in close collaboration with the open source community and data Artisans team, has made numerous contributions to the Flink codebase over the last 2 years. Moving forward together, data Artisans and Alibaba will not only continue, but accelerate contributions to Apache Flink and open source Big Data. As a first step, Alibaba announced their commitment to contribute their in-house developments around Flink — Blink — to the open source community."